The present invention relates to a system for, and method of sale enhancement for retail businesses, and in particular for sales enhancement of products such as fast foods, which are of different types, yet are related to each other, so as to construct a family set or a kit.
Although the present invention applies to various retail businesses and environments, the description provided herein centers around the fast food restaurant industry.
As used herein in the specification and in the claims section that follows, the term “Patron” refers to a customer, particularly to a restaurant customer; the term “Sale” is used herein in place of the more common term “order” to distinguish between a request made by a customer and the manner in which items are arranged or sorted; the term “Sale Terminals” includes cash registers, electronic cash registers (ECR's) and Point of Sale (POS) terminals.
While fast food restaurants and outlets specialize in specific food items, such as hamburgers, doughnuts, pizzas, and the like, such restaurants typically sell various side items and dishes, such as beverages, French fries, salads and various desserts, all of which constitute a source of additional revenue.
As competition in the business grows, acquiring new patrons is becoming more difficult, and restaurant managements are looking for ways to increase the sale per patron. It is highly desirable to interest patrons in purchasing additional and larger, more profitable items (also known as up-selling). This is typically achieved by offering promotions in the form of combination meals at a special, reduced price, and by training cashiers to encourage patrons to order such combination meals, additional items and larger portions.
Often only a small degree of persuasion is necessary to get the patron to increase his order. However, the cashiers that could potentially realize these extra sales are usually young, inexperienced and have little motivation. Although frequently trained and constantly coached to offer additional items or prompt for larger portions, such motivation fades rapidly away and the effort spent on their coaching is essentially wasted.
Most cashiers can hardly remember the item sold after the item has been entered to the Sale Terminal, but the full picture is important in realizing sales of additional items. According to the prior art, cashiers look at the printed tickets of the sale-order. The sale-orders are printed the way they are ordered, and in order to compare, for instance, the number of main courses to the number of beverages, the cashier has to go through the ticket. This is slow and tedious, and consequently, cashiers rarely perform this function properly, if at all. Some newer prior art systems display the list of items as a metaphor of the printed ticket on the screen, and so the cashier does not have to examine tickets. More advanced systems use the displayed ticket as an input device, so that the displayed items can be selected by pointing at them with a mouse or a touch and the cashier can then act on the selected item (delete, enlarge, etc.).
According to the prior art, the data entry methods used by many restaurant systems often combine the type of menu item with size or flavor descriptions (“modifiers”). These methods are based on a simple arithmetic algorithm that uses a set of arithmetic factors that add up to an item of a Price Look Up (PLU) number.
A restaurant may sell three beverage types: Cola, Sprite and Fanta, all of which are available in four sizes: Regular, Small and Large and in two nutritional values: Regular and Diet.
The restaurant assigns values to the various terms as follows:
Cola - 1000;Sprite - 2000;Fanta - 3000;Regular - 0;Small - 100;Large - 200;Diet - 10.
To get to the specific menu item, one must add up all the numbers assigned to the terms that define it, for example:    Regular Cola=1000+0=1000    Regular Diet Cola=1000+0+10=1010    Large Diet Fanta=3000+200+10=3210.
The system dictates the PLU number-structure and has many disadvantages, mostly associated with inflexibility. For example, such systems do not support partial data entry.
Touch screens are extensively used, in the prior art, for POS terminals in various industries, especially in table service and fast food restaurants.
Conventional touch screens provide superb band-eye coordination, but provide neither tactile nor kinesthetic feedback. Consequently, the use of touch screens forces the cashier to look at the screen while operating. The need to look and concentrate on the screen causes the cashier to lose eye contact with the patron and thus interfere with the up-selling process. The software senses when the screen is touched and when the touch terminates (lifted), and the exact location of the touch or the lifting. The screen is divided for this purpose into touch areas, also known as buttons.
In these, prior art, touch-sensitive applications, systems use touches in these button-areas as cues to some action or function, starting with single entry of a character or a digit through invocation of large software modules. The set of touch, lift and location at the touch-area or in a close vicinity (the maximum distance between all these events being less than a pre-set parameter) is usually considered to be a ‘Click”. If the time interval between the touch and the lift is larger than a pre-set times, the set of events is interpreted as a “Long Click and a “Very Long Click”. The software identifies the touch area (button) and executes the command or action associated with the button and the type of click.
The use of conventional touch screens does not solve the problem of the cashier losing eye contact with the patron, and the resultant interference with the up-selling process. Additionally, prior art systems suffer from all these many drawbacks, mentioned hereinabove, and above all, from the inability to effectively enhance the promotion and enlargement of sale-orders. There is thus a widely recognized need for, and it would be highly advantageous to have, a system for, and a method of, sales enhancement for serving retail businesses in general, and restaurants in particular, in their efforts to increase revenues at the point of sale.